What’s in your Honey?

Ayurveda prescribes it for a range of ailments. People eat it for rejuvenation and boosting immunity. An Indian homemaker’s kitchen shelf is incomplete without a jar of this amber liquid.

But without quality and safety controls, this gift of nature has been contaminated. CSE laboratory tests find high levels of antibiotics in well-known brands of honey sold in the market. Chandra Bhushan reports on the findings. Savvy Soumya Misra trails beekeepers across four states and finds honey is being produced with the help of antibiotics and pesticides; Arnab Pratim Dutta looks at the thriving business of honey laundering

Honey sold within India is never checked for contaminants as there are no standards in place (Photo: Sayantan Bera)Universally, honey is believed to be a natural product. Regulations across the world say as much. The Codex Alimentarius Commission is a global body set up jointly by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop food standards for international trade; it defines honey as “the natural sweet substance produced by honeybees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in the honeycomb to ripen and mature”.

This definition of honey is now threatened. In several countries, the beekeeping industry uses antibiotics to control outbreaks of diseases in honeybees, and as growth promoters to increase production. And these antibiotics are finding their way into that spoonful which reaches the house-holder’s table. So what is the world doing about it?